King, Gerads team up on ‘Jack Kirby’s Jesus’ — Mister Miracle

New 12-issue series launches in August.

Paste Magazine shares the news that Tom King and Mitch Gerads, the team behind Vertigo’s popular The Sheriff of Babylon series, are teaming up on a Mister Miracle series at DC Comics. The 12-issue miniseries (Maxiseries? Is that still a thing?) launches in August. Doom Patrol artist Nick Derington will provide the covers.

If you dug King’s other great series-turned-maxiseries, Omega Men, a look at some of the pages from the first issue might make you squeal:

In going back and reading all of Kirby, you’re dipping your head in genius. No one can out-Kirby Kirby. You can’t make an epic as great as he did. It’s like trying to make Star Wars again, or like trying to rewrite the Iliad. You can take those grand cosmic space opera themes and internalize them and use them to tell a very personal story. That’s what appealed to me about it. We were going to take the bigness of Kirby and turn that into the intimacy of Mister Miracle’s life. Kirby used a metaphor for his time, written in the late ‘60s early ‘70s when the world was going utterly insane. We’re going to use it as a metaphor for our time, the late 2010s, when once again the world is going insane. It’s almost like we’re holding up a mirror to that work, or internalizing it. We’re going step-in-step with him.

The book is edited by Jamie S. Rich, who also edited Sheriff of Babylon. It should be fun seeing this team that was focused on the stark realism of crime in Iraq kind of go nuts on one of Kirby’s New Gods. August can’t get here soon enough.